Location: Intersection of W. Club Blvd and Broad St, Durham
County: Durham
Original Date Cast: 2023
Booker Thomas Spicely was born December 1, 1909, in Blackstone, Virginia, the fourth of seven children, but had moved to Philadelphia as a young man, where he was working and living at the outbreak of World War II. At the end of 1943, Spicely enlisted in the Army at the age of thirty-four and was assigned to Camp Butner in Granville County, where he served as a truck driver. On July 8, 1944, Pfc. Spicely and another Black soldier, Pfc. Willie Edwards, boarded a westbound bus at the corner of Fayetteville and Pettigrew Streets in Durham heading towards Camp Butner. The bus was owned and operated by Duke Power Company and a White man, Herman Lee Council, was the driver.
When three White soldiers, also headed for Camp Butner, boarded the bus, Council ordered Spicely and the other African Americans to give up their seats for the new passengers and move to the back. Spicely questioned why he had to give up his seat for the White soldiers and was told he should “settle down” if he wanted to remain on the bus. When Spicely exited the bus five minutes later, Council followed Spicely and shot Spicely twice at close range with bus passengers as witnesses. Spicely was taken to Duke Hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
Council surrendered himself to law enforcement the same day, having continued his route and leaving Spicely dying in the street. The circumstances leading to Spicely’s murder were rooted in the “Jim Crow” laws prevalent throughout the United States and, in particular, the South. “Jim Crow” was a racist term used by Whites in reference to Blacks that had become common by the mid-nineteenth century, believed to come from a derogatory song about Blacks called “Jump Jim Crow.” With the collapse of Reconstruction in the South and a loss of interest in protecting African American rights in the rest of the country, laws were introduced at both the state and federal levels, at first gradually, limiting or depriving Blacks of their civil rights and creating barriers to interactions between them and Whites. The passage of these laws accelerated beginning in the 1890s. Among the laws passed were statutes limiting Black access to public transportation, such as trolley cars and, later buses. Blacks were required to either take separate transportation from Whites, or in cases where they were allowed to use the same transportation, they were forced to give up a seat in the front of the bus to any White person. This was the legal situation in place at the time of Spicely’s death.
Durham’s Black community took a strong interest in the case and Dr. James E. Shepard, founder of what is now North Carolina Central University, and C. C. Spaulding, president of the locally based North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, used their influence to help put together a team to help authorities prosecute the case. Durham civil rights attorneys Caswell Jerry “C. J.” Gates and M. H. Thompson worked with the Durham County solicitor (the equivalent of a modern-day district attorney) W. H. Murdock in the prosecution of the case. Attorneys from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund who also consulted on the case included future United States Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP’s first general counsel Charles Hamilton Houston, and Edward R. Dudley, a graduate of Johnson C. Smith College in Charlotte and the first African American to be named an American ambassador. Louis Austin, publisher and editor of the African American newspaper The Carolina Times of Durham, provided extensive coverage of Spicely’s killing and subsequent trial of Council.
The influence of local Black leaders Shepard and Spaulding, seen as accommodationists in the tradition of Booker T. Washington muted the participation of the NAACP in the case. Over the objections of Spicely’s brother Robert, they pressured Gates and Thompson to retain a local White attorney rather than the NAACP attorneys to work with the prosecution. Governor J. Melville Broughton, fearing the NAACP attorneys’ involvement would lead to racial unrest, had asked Shepard and Spaulding to intervene in the matter and exclude the NAACP attorneys. In return, Broughton assured Shepard, Spaulding, and other Black leaders in Durham that there would be a fair trial.
The killing of Booker T. Spicely along with other racially motivated attacks, that targeted African American servicemen and civilians played a major role in sparking the revitalization of the North Carolina branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Although local branches of the organization had existed in the state as far back as 1917, action between the local branches was often uncoordinated, and many local branch heads advocated an accommodationist approach for dealing with racism. The impetus to reinvigorate the organization had already begun even before Spicely’s killing, but it was not until 1943 that a state-wide governing organization for the North Carolina chapters had been established. The crime and the acquittal of Council accelerated the process. Louis Austin played a crucial role in the growth of the North Carolina NAACP as a strong supporter of the civil rights crusade with his newspaper providing regular coverage of the movement and of cases of white supremacist violence. The Spicely case and the response of local Black leaders such as Shephard and Spaulding particularly angered Austin, who with allies worked to ensure that Spicely’s death would not be forgotten. In September 1943, they rose to power over the local NAACP branch, which at the time of the killing had virtually no rank-and-file members. New leaders replaced accommodationist forces within the Durham chapter, which was renamed after Spicely. Austin himself was elected as chapter president and naming the. In November 1944, the NAACP launched a major membership drive in Durham, and over the next five months, 197 new members joined the Durham chapter. In addition, as a result of the Spicely case, his brother Robert was able to organize a new NAACP branch in Tuskegee, Alabama, where he worked.
Spicely’s protest against Jim Crow laws was part of a larger, national civil rights struggle. Notably, his challenge to Jim Crow segregation laws occurred more than a decade before Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat sparked the famous bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, a seminal moment in American civil rights history. While Spicely’s protest did not have the same impact as Parks’ better-known stand, the case drew statewide attention, galvanized and strengthened North Carolina’s NAACP as a statewide organization, and included the participation of prominent members of the legal field in North Carolina and across the nation.
References:
“Along the N.A.A.C.P. Battlefront,” The Crisis, 51:10 (October 1944).
Burnham, Margaret A., By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners (2022).
“Bus Driver is Bound Over on Murder Charges,” Durham Sun, July 10, 1944.
Carolina Times, 1944.
“Certificate of Death,” North Carolina State Board of Health, 1944.
“Driver Acquitted in Bus Shooting,” Durham Morning Herald, September 16, 1944.
Reginald K. Ellis, Between Washington and DuBois: The Racial Politics of James Edward Shepard (2017).
Jerry Gershenhorn, Louis Austin and the Carolina Times (2018).
“Gunned Down in Durham in 1944,” Courier Record (Blackstone, VA), 2022.
“Hearing Waived as Drive is Sent Up to Superior Court,” Durham Morning Herald, July 11, 1944.
“Memorial Service Held for Spicely,” Herald-Sun (Durham), September 25, 1944.
Timothy B. Tyson, “Wars for Democracy,” Democracy Betrayed, ed. by David S. Cecelski and Timothy B.
Tyson (1998).